These days even a desktop computer is capable of some extreme number crunching

Getting a lot out of a little is one
of the most fascinating forms of enthusiasm in the tech community.
Whether it's squeezing
Windows 7 onto a Pentium II dinosaur, or making a homebrew SNES
handheld, such endeavors are truly intriguing.

Perhaps the
latest and greatest wonder of hardware overachievement is the story
of French native Fabrice Bellard, who now holds the world
record in PI calculation. He calculated Pi to 2.7 trillion
decimal digits, surpassing mark of 2.5 trillion digits set
in August by the T2K Open Supercomputer (which at the time was
the 47th most
powerful supercomputer in the world).

So what's so
impressive about Mr. Bellard's feat, aside from its basic technical
merits? He accomplished the number crunching, not on a
supercomputer, but on a Nehalem-powered desktop.

His
machine featured a Core i7 CPU running at 2.93 GHz, 6 GB of RAM, and
five 1.5 Terabyte Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 model hard drives (for a
total of 7.5 TB). The system ran the 64-bit Red Hat Fedora 10
distribution as its primary OS and used software RAID-0 and the ext4
file system.

The result takes up 1137 GB of storage and is
(partially) available
here. The computation took 103 days of computing time for
the modest desktop.

The only time when Mr. Bellard had
to enlist the help of other computers was during the verification.
In order to avoid being displaced from the top spot while the desktop
chugged on the results (that would have taken an additional 13 days),
he instead used a network of nine computers to verify the results in
a shorter timespan.

In order to calculate Pi, Mr. Bellard used
a software algorithm based on the well known Chudnovsky formula and
verified the resulting calculations by the Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe
algorithm which directly gives the n'th hexadecimal digits of Pi.
Checksums were used to detect errors.

The more optimized Pi
algorithm based on the Chudnovsky formula that Mr. Bellard uses is
the fastest current way to calculate Pi and has been renamed
Bellard's formula in his honor. Mr. Bellard is perhaps most
famous for writing the tiny c compiler (tcc), a popular lightweight
compiler in the Linux community.

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Have you ever been to France or contemplated French culture? Of course the French are proud people with a certain level of conservatism for their culture, but we also embrace U.S. culture and honour it within ours.

Political issues are all-together a different matter in my opinion. There have been some political sparks between both nations in the past 60 years mainly because the french government has a pretty loud mouth and prided themselves as being an military and political autarchism unlike some other puppet nations (cough Engl... cough). I mean, as a U.S. citizen, how would you feel if Mexico started to meddle with our political landscape or deploying their troops within our border (and gosh, in some way, they are already doing that LOL)?

Let me be clear on this: I only see this resentment of the French coming from the U.S and some of its vassal states, as a one-sided-affair.

There will always be a certain % of the population that will find an excuse to hate.

If the topic includes France it becomes a target. Same with the US in other countries, same with certain brands of cars, clothing, religions, etc, etc. It is a subjective flaw in realizing the sources of personal discontent for such people and it matters not what the topic is.

They'll ignore 100 positive facts and focus on a couple negative because they are practiced in selectively ignoring anything that does not prop up the idea that they and everything about them, is the center of the universe and that all the evil in the world is due to anyone who is not just like them.